North Sea Martial Arts Warrior - Chapter 68

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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68. Those Called Barbarians

The path narrowed, then opened wide again.
After crossing barren wasteland, the party entered a small town, where a long wall of grey stone came into view.
The smell of spring earth lay settled over the grass.
Within it stood forty raised swords in perfect array.
The warriors stood arrayed like soldiers, each blade at the same angle. The grey-bearded man in the center was the sect master, with forty disciples aligned on either side of him.
The plaque hanging above the main gate caught the sunlight.
Geogeommun.
A small martial sect that, true to its name, raised the sword to heights unseen.
The sect was small in numbers, but its blade-work was known throughout the Border Region for its sharpness.
Shing! Shing!
The party halted before the main gate.
The peaceful village entrance was suddenly suffused with killing intent.
Not one of the party drew a weapon. And yet—forty blades burning with hostility. The grey eyes swept across the arrayed swords, then fixed on the man in the center.
Aelak’s gaze was not on the blades themselves, but on the wrists that held them.
The tremor in the hands, whether the knuckles gripping the sword were tense, the grip-strength channeled through the blade—in one glance, he gauged their martial prowess.
The sect disciples’ breathing was synchronized, yet that very synchronization appeared as a vessel containing their killing intent, holding it down. As though they were desperately maintaining composure.
The sect master opened his mouth.
“A barbaric rabble from the North!”
Whoosh!
With that single utterance, forty swords moved as one.
Sword light poured out from inside the gate to outside it all at once. No questions asked, no warning to stand aside. These were not men coming to receive guests. This was the stance of those who had come to kill from the start.
“They’re even more reckless than we are. How does that even happen?”
Harku let out a short laugh from his saddle.
Garkan answered belatedly from beside him.
“News of us must have already reached them. Which means… they heard what we said too. The part about living if you stand aside.”
Garkan descended slowly from his saddle.
The last strand of the Bing Cheol Sae unwound from his wrist and fell beside his foot. Garkan wrapped his fingers around it, from pinky to thumb.
‘It’s been a long time. My hands this cold.’
With that thought, Garkan’s lips curved upward.
Harku moved to stand beside him.
The two Twin Curved Blades left their sheaths simultaneously.
The corner of his mouth rose slightly, but his eyes did not smile. Rather, they glinted like those of a wild cat.
“Fair warning. Those swords—if you don’t lower them, your necks will fly.”
It was spoken in jest, yet it was no joke.
Those who bring swords taste steel. That was Aelak’s resolve. The youngest merely spoke it aloud once more.
Arko drew out the Poison Daggers.
Two blades fit neatly between his fingers.
“Another time, there’d be no reason to kill them—but the chieftain left us with only two choices: life or death. So why did you have to provoke the North Sea?”
Arko muttered to himself. No one was listening.
Serian and Taikan remained mounted.
Taikan’s hand rested on the bowstring. Geogeommun—at this level, three of them would be sufficient. There was no need for him to intervene.
The sect master of Geogeommun called out again.
“Strike them down! Leave not a single one alive!”
Forty men rushed forward at once. The space before the main gate transformed into a forest of blades.
“So this is how it is. Sometimes you must kill even when you’d rather not. Are they telling us not to speak to them? I understand the message not to come looking—but we can’t do that! A man is dead!”
Whoosh!
Garkan’s Bing Cheol Sae uncoiled.
It ensnared the legs of two men rushing forward in a single sweep.
In an instant, they buckled at the knees, not understanding what had happened. The chain surged from their legs straight up, wrapping around their necks.
Crack!
The sound of necks snapping echoed.
Harku spun his Twin Curved Blades and charged forward.
One shoulder sliced—and again, a knee cut through, the upper body bending forward, and with that motion he swings the blade upward. The neck opens.
Thud!
One man collapsed without a fight.
The afterimage of the spinning Twin Curved Blades lingered briefly in the sunlight before vanishing.
Harku did not resort to his habitual ankle-slash this time. The opponent was not worth that courtesy.
A blade is drawn only until life departs.
Arko wielded his Poison Daggers with equal savagery.
Thud-thud-thud-thud-thud!
Steel punched through flesh in rapid succession. While the Geogeommun disciple could draw his sword once, Arko buried his daggers eight times—four to each side.
The man struck by the Poison Daggers trembled.
His body froze in an instant. There was no need even to mention the toxin coating the blades—blood erupted from eight vital points, each one fatal.
The poison stopped its spread where it touched flesh.
The martial prowess gap was absolute.
Garkan’s voice tore through the air.
“Block and I’ll break you!”
Before his words had finished, Bing Cheol Sae was already in motion.
The swords of three sect disciples snapped clean from their hilts.
The Tan Gang Swords that Geogeommun took pride in had razor-sharp edges, but they were helpless before Bing Cheol Sae.
Crack!
First move of the Tan Gang Sword: Horizontal Cleave.
The swordmaster wielded his blade fiercely to split the chain apart, attempting to bind it to his sword and tear it free—but he collapsed onto the grass before he could even fully deploy his technique.
Garkan’s shout was no threat. It was the declaration of one who already knew how this would end.
Only a man who understood the limits of his own hands could speak with such certainty.
Harku answered from beside him.
The Twin Curved Blades rotated, catching the shoulders and knees of two men at once.
“Back away and you live, you fools!”
Before the words left his mouth, both men fell to their knees. One of them had been cut across the same spot twice.
“I said move. I won’t tell you twice.”
Harku brought down another man.

In the span of a few breaths, half their number lay fallen.
Twenty of the forty disciples were sprawled before the main gate. All dead. Their wounds were too catastrophic—even the greatest physician in all the land could not save them.
The sword-tips of the remaining disciples wavered.
The Tan Gang Sword’s second move, Direct Strike, could not keep pace with the three rotations. It was as though their swordsmanship fell short. No—these three were simply too strong.
‘We cannot match them.’
Defeat carved itself into their hearts in those few exchanges.
There was no point in continuing. They could not even wound these three, let alone kill them. It would be nothing but a futile, shameful death.
The remaining half stumbled backward in retreat.
“Hold the line! The Master is watching!”
Someone cried out.
Yet even the one who spoke felt his voice crack with despair. Not one of these three was inferior to the Master.
‘How are we supposed to fight?’
Strength drained from their sword-hands.
Their eyes shifted toward the Master.
The Master stood motionless with his sword halfway drawn from its sheath. While half his disciples fell, his hand had not drawn the blade further.
Even the trembling in his wrist had ceased. A trembling hand deserves to be one that has drawn a weapon, not one frozen in place on a hilt.
Whish!
Aelak descended from his horse.
He swept his gaze across the courtyard, then walked steadily toward the Master inside the main gate.
One step. Another step.
He passed the corpses of the fallen disciples and advanced without hesitation—entirely unguarded.
Wherever his feet touched, death was etched into the earth.
The Extreme Yin Coldness radiated from his footsteps. It was not a space-freezing technique. He was not consciously wielding the cold.
He simply walked, and the air itself sensed it first, lowering its warmth.
Aelak’s Extreme Yin Coldness had reached a stage where it could flow without conscious control.
Since Karani’s funeral, the cold he had locked away deep within was now finding its own path through his fingertips and feet.
The grass beneath his steps lost its green and faded to grey.
A strangled gasp escaped the Master’s throat.
His hand would not leave the sword’s hilt.
He forced more strength into his grip, trying to draw further. But his hand had frozen. The knowledge that drawing his sword meant death became overwhelmingly, undeniably clear.
A lifetime devoted to the blade, and now he could not even unsheathe it—crushed beneath such overwhelming presence.
‘My sword is… Is there truly such a being in this world…?’
The recognition of this magnificent presence carved itself into his mind.
This man is no barbarian from the North Sea. He is a reaper—one who has come from the North Sea.
The Master’s thoughts hardened like stone.
‘This man… he is a supreme warrior. The mightiest under heaven. We exist on an entirely different plane.’
It was not merely a difference in martial prowess. His very stature was different.
Before that truth, a lifetime of training compressed into a single breath. The value of everything he had walked through his years of swordcraft… amounted to that.
Aelak came to a halt before the Master.
Eyes gleaming with wolfish fervor—gray eyes—beheld the Master’s trembling hands.
In the depths of those gray eyes lay Karani. He already knew that the bond summoned by his blade might touch somewhere along the paths his children would walk.
“Someone went to the North Sea two months ago. Who?”
A terse question. A demand for a name.
The Master’s mouth had gone dry. He swallowed once. And before his tongue could stiffen entirely, the answer fell from his lips.
“…I don’t know.”
It was not a lie. There was no room for deception here. Yet he wanted to speak some name, even a false one. As if that alone would let him live.
But hearing those words, Aelak turned away without further remark.
To have killed twenty sect disciples was almost trivial by comparison. To have killed so many swordsmen merely to ask this single question—it spoke volumes.
He did not press further about the North Sea visitor. He had already recognized that no falsehood lingered in that trembling voice.
Gray eyes swept past with utter indifference.
Aelak’s footsteps turned toward the main gate. The Master’s lantern swayed somewhere deeper in the garden, but he did not look that far.
An unguarded back crossed through the wreckage of blades. The hand that might have reached for it already lay fallen upon the grass.
Garkan wound the Bing Cheol Sae around his wrist once more, from pinky to thumb in a single motion.
He surveyed the swordsmen sprawled before the main gate.
All dead. Not one survivor. Those cut by steel, those claimed by the Bing Cheol Sae… they had been granted instant death without even a moment to resist.
Garkan opened his mouth.
“If you had simply stepped aside, you would have lived! But as warriors, is it not glory to die in combat? Is it not? For us it is. We care not where we fall. Tell them all. Tell every martial artist in the Central Plains.”
Each word that left Garkan’s lips rang through Geogeommun.
It was not a threat. It was the manner of one who accepted even his own death.
The Master heard those words. Every conscious sect disciple heard them. They understood: only one with the same resolve could stand against a blade wielded by someone who feared death nowhere.
“Let’s go.”
Aelak’s brief command fell from his saddle to the party below.
The setting sun lay askew across the gray stone walls.

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After the party departed, the interior of the main gate grew heavy with silence.
The dead were carried away. Half had survived, half had fallen. They had breathed their last without drawing their swords even once, despite a lifetime of training in the blade.
The weapons felt heavier still in the hands of the survivors. They could not lift their own swords with their own strength, and they made their way into the garden.
The Master returned to his chambers. There he unrolled paper and took up his brush.
For a long while, his hand trembled too much to write the first character.
A sect master who could not protect his disciples… a swordsman who could not draw his blade before his enemy.
He did not know why his hand trembled with such shame and humiliation. But one thing was certain: the way of the sword he had cultivated in Geogeommun his entire life… had lost all meaning.
He who had spent his life breaking swords could not draw his own. That truth was etched into steel.
“…I must write it.”
The Master spoke to himself. No one was there to hear.
“This man is not one we can stop.”
The Master finally wrote a line. His hand shook so badly he wrote it again.
“A barbarian. Only the Alliance Leader or the Greatest Swordmaster in the Land can face him.”
Writing that single line was so difficult.
A dispatch to be sent to the Murim Alliance.
“Go.”
The Master handed the dispatch to his disciple.

At that same moment, the dispatches heading from the Border Region toward the Murim Alliance did not depart from Geogeommun alone. From Cheongwol Bang, Ha-seo Pyo-guk, Harang Village, Song Taek… one message took flight from each place the party had passed through.
Five days to reach Murim Alliance Headquarters, one day to read and collate them all.
In that time, the party would have descended further south.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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